LouiseAnna: stopping off in Fatu Hiva, Marquesas Islands

Who: Louise, Anna, Kim & Geoffrey

Where: Fatu Hiva, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia

Boat: Nautitech 40

Blog:  www.sailinglouiseanna.blogspot.com

Arriving in the Marquesas was exciting! The first island we visited was Fatu Hiva in the south. We could only just make out a silhouette of the mountains when the moon managed to shine through the thick clouds. The smell was overpowering. It was as though thousands of flowers were enveloping our boat! It was 11pm and instead of waiting all night for the sun to come up, we were being guided into the anchorage by our friends who had arrived a few days earlier and had saved us a great spot! After a well-deserved beer and a good night’s sleep, we took a long breakfast under the rain. The girls experienced the smell for the first time, and they were like dogs sniffing around a new garden!  After the rain had rinsed off all the salt and reenergized us, we decided it was time to set foot on land. It was a great feeling after 27 days out at sea. Tall green walls surrounded us, and we just couldn’t believe that we had made it this far. To conclude these two already very intense days, we had a Marquesan dinner with 4 other boats at Jean-Pierre’s house. They cooked a wild pig in a hole in their garden, covered by banana leaves and ‘juten’ bags. The meat was deliciously soft and accompanied by manioc in coconut, steamed breadfruit, banana/tapioca mixture, chicken with rice (for the kids) and as a starter we had raw tuna in coconut milk. Jean-Pierre and his lovely wife are a very interesting couple and they taught us a lot about their people and island life. We spent a few days cleaning (the hull was yellow from the huge volume of plankton in the Pacific) combined with some island exploration in the afternoon. We’ve now been here for 5 days but it feels like months. However, there’s still so much to see and we have so little time. So, a last quick swim and a beautiful sunset to make our visit complete. Ciao Fatu Hiva,